230 pages
Rating: (8.1K votes)
“Wesley went everywhere with me from then on. I even wrapped him in baby blankets and held him in my arms while grocery shopping, to keep him warm during the first cold winter. Occasionally someone would ask to see "the baby," and when I opened the blanket, would leap back shrieking, "What is that?! A dinosaur?" Apparently, the world is full of educated adults with mortgages and stock portfolios who think people are walking around grocery stores with dinosaurs in their arms.”
“Wesley taught me the Way of the Owl. In the human world your value as a person is often intrinsically linked to your wealth or most recent accomplishment. But all the accoutrements of the world were stripped away from me when I got sick. Welsey made me realize that if all I had to give was love, that was enough. I didn't need money, status, accomplishment, glamour or many of the empty things we so value.”
“People seem to deny the existence of animal emotions so that they can continue to justify inhumane treatment and exploitation and avoid the fact that our actions have a deep emotional impact on our fellow beings.”
“Because predators tend to eat the weakest of a species, they keep the remaining population strong. Without predators, herds become weak and disabled. In contrast, when humans hunt animals for trophies, they kill the strongest of the species, thereby weakening the herd.”
“When describing both the act of defecating and the substance of fecal matter itself, biologists prefer to use the scientific term "poop." It's both a noun and a verb. A popular field of biology called scatology is the study of scat, which is not to be confused with mere poop. Although technically they're the same, we call it "scat" if we are studying it to learn something about the health and diet of an animal. When the animal has pooped on us or has ruined something with his pooping, we tend to use the term "shit," as in, "Oh, man, he just shit down the back of my neck." So if it's on the ground, it's poop. If it's under your microscope, it's scat. If it's running down your neck, it's shit.”
“Of course, owls on the loose seemed strange to the uninitiated. One day an electrician came to work on the building's power supply, when, seemingly out of nowhere, an owl flew around a corner right at him. The poor guy let out an unearthly scream and hit the floor, covering his head and yelling in Spanish.”
“Ignorance of the actual dynamics of daily life can be bliss sometimes. Because we know chemistry and biology, we know that when we smelled something, the molecules from the source of the smell had actually entered our noses and taken up residence on our receptors. So when we smelled a dirty person, this meant that some of his filthy molecules had actually gotten into our nasal passages. This bothered us. We didn't want to know that person that well, and we certainly didn't want his disgusting molecules in our nasal receptors.”
“He was from Yorkshire, or somewhere like that, and like many Northerners with issues, he'd moved to London as a cheap alternative to psychotherapy.”
“I am going to Sky Talk library,” Soother told Soother’s-Pride. “I understand that a new book about one of the early human rulers has been sent down by the humans on one of the alternate communication channels. I want to study it carefully for new ideas. I hope that the ideas on government by the human Napoleon will prove to be as interesting as those of Machiavelli were.”
“Every year, the bright Scandinavian summer nights fade without anyone's noticing. One evening in August you have an errand outdoors, and all of a sudden it's pitch-black. It is still summer, but the summer is no longer alive.”
“Justice being taken away, then, what are kingdoms but great robberies? For what are robberies themselves, but little kingdoms?”
“But everything's always been fucked up. Since the dawn of time. That's why people find each other. For comfort. For shelter. They find their own little crevice in the world, shielded from all the horror.”
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